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23 June 05   Frank Lloyd Wright boathouse to be named
                 in honor of Charles and Marie Fontana.

click for more information

10 June 05    A&E Home Video press release

ON JUNE 28TH, A&E HOME VIDEO WILL RELEASE THE ARRESTING FINAL BOXED SET OF THE EMMY® AWARD-WINNING COP SERIES



HOMICIDE: LIFE ON THE STREET:
THE COMPLETE SEASON 7

Hailed as the Best Cop Drama of All Time, The Final Gripping Season Set Finishes off the Franchise with a Bang, With an Exclusive “Live” DVD Commentary Session Featuring Barry Levison, Tom Fontana, David Simon and Jim Yoshimura.

6 June 05       "Bedford Diaries"

Two shots from the WB upfront party

   
Tom with Stephen Collins and Ivan Fonseca

25 May 05

"The WB has picked up 12 episodes of the Tom Fontana-produced series "The Bedford Diaries" to be aired mid-season."


24 May 05

Acclaimed film director Sidney Lumet joins forces with Emmy-winning Oz creator Tom Fontana to explore the precarious status of individual liberties post-9/11 through two parallel stories -- each containing identical dialogues -- taking place on two continents half a world away.

Amnesty International USA  Link to full article

2 May 05

On April 28, 2005, Tom Fontana received, alongside David Chase, a special Edgar Award from the Mystery Writers of America.  David Simon wrote the following remarks in the souvenir program:

SPECIAL EDGAR
Tom Fontana
By David Simon

As a preamble of sorts, consider for a moment the unlikelihood of actually writing the pilot of a new television drama, then showing it to network executives.  Imagine taking all their notes, placating all of their fears, assuring them that the serial will be neither weak and derivative nor so original and idiosyncratic that it will do anything other than appeal to a mass audience.

Then consider the improbability of having that pilot get the green light, of it somehow being properly cast and directed, of the sum of its parts adding up to something meaningful and worthy.  Multiply all of these long-shot variables by ten and you can imagine having that pilot picked up for a season of episodes.  Multiply them by about a hundred and you can imagine a network actually airing those episodes in order and then renewing the enterprise for three or four more seasons.

Writing for television is, at all points, a Homeric enterprise.  To produce a St. Elsewhere, a Homicide, or an Oz is a career unto itself.  But to help create and sustain three such universes, guiding season after season of storytelling to natural and meaningful conclusions is something very near to magical.

A playwright by training and a writer to the core, Tom long ago proved himself not only as a master storyteller, but as a producer capable of shepherding his stories through the ridiculous minefield that is network programming.

He does not produce breakout, snatch-the-zeitgeist hits.  Homicide?  Only Tom Fontan could have eked 123 episodes out of that brilliant, off-center Baltimore police drama.  St. Elsewhere?  The ratings got there belatedly, with not even half the fanfare of such contemporary ensemble dramas as, say, Hill Street Blues.  And Oz was a place of foreboding where middle-of-the-road television viewers would rarely tread.

But the humanity on display in those dramas – the characters, the conflicts, the wit – offer some of our culture’s best serialized storytelling.  And each drama grew to prove itself with reckless and relentless daring: Pembleton’s stroke, Beecher’s agonizing loss of innocence, even the entire contents of a Boston hospital trapped in the imagination of a single autistic child.

Tom takes chances in a medium where so few people do.

After all, given all those improbabilities listed above – given how absurdly hard it is to get a television drama up and running, to build and sustain a fictional universe against all forces arrayed against it, to find and keep a mass viewership interested in that universe – who wouldn’t try to sustain a successful drama by doing the same things over and over?

But in a medium where rote repetition is its own reward, Tom refuses to serve anything other than his own sense of story.  Among the producers of television drama, Tom Fontana stands apart for allowing character and story to triumph over the safe, careful choices.  Every hour of a Fontana serial is an argument against formula and complacency in a medium too often predicated on such.

With millions of dollars and hundreds of thousands of viewers at stake, who in their right mind makes the unsafe, uncertain choice?  Who indeed, other than a writer.
---------
David Simon sold his Edgar-award-winning book, Homicide: A Year on the Killing Streets to NBC and eventually ruined his career in journalism by going to work for Tom Fontana as a writer on the resulting episodic drama.  He learned a great deal about television and even more about the medicinal properties of Wild Turkey.  He is currently the creator and executive producer of The Wire on HBO.

11 April 05

Fontana inks 2-script deal with Sony TV

Emmy-winning writer-producer Tom Fontana has inked a premium two-script deal with Sony Pictures Television. Under the pact, Fontana will pen two drama pilot scripts for the studio targeted for the next development cycle, a procedural and a character-driven one-hour.

the Hollywood Reporter (link to full article)

4 March 05

Development Update:

By The Futon Critic Staff

UNTITLED TOM FONTANA/BARRY LEVINSON PROJECT (The WB) - Matthew Modine ("The Winning Season") has been cast as David Macklan in the Tom Fontana/Barry Levinson-produced drama pilot, about the teachers and students at a small Manhattan college. Modine will play the professor that teaches the controversial human behavior and sexuality class that serves as the centerpiece of the series. Julie Martin and Jim Finnerty also serve as executive producers on the HBO Independent Productions/Warner Bros. Television-based project, which also stars Milo Ventimiglia, Penn Badgley and Ernest Waddell.

thefutoncritic.com (link to full article)

3 March 05

OZ Season 5 DVD

June 21st  is the release date for the Season 5 OZ DVD.
Look for the Season 6 DVD in September.

24 February 05

Paying for it

From an article posted on the Broadcasting & Cable web site which talks about "skyrocketing talent costs":

... But not everybody in the game believes it's money well spent, especially when a mix of fear and lack of imagination appears to be driving the spending decisions. “This isn't a knock against Gary Sinise, who is a wonderful actor, and the show he's on is a hit,” says Oz and Homicide creator Tom Fontana, currently working on pilots for CBS and the WB. “And backing up the Brinks truck to pay Chris Noth to help out Criminal Intent, I can understand how that happens. But too often the networks and studios are allowing what people get paid to get totally out of hand. How many actors are there who the public is going say, 'I absolutely have to watch that show because Aidan Quinn is in it'? Then the studios and networks who create the climate go and moan that everything costs too much money.”

Broadcasting & Cable  Link to full article (subscription required)

3 February 05

"Homicide": More life on DVD for acclaimed series

"Barry said he wanted to do a police show that had no gun battles and no car chases. Because that was too crazy of an idea to work, I just had to be a part of it, part of something that original."
 
St. Louis Post-Dispach  Link to full article

1 February 05

TV torture scenes are ugly, powerful, exploitative—and a mirror of our national debate.

... For sheer Cassandra-like precision, you can’t beat Tom Fontana’s movie Strip Search, which first aired on HBO last spring. It depicted a female U.S. interrogator sexually taunting an Arab detainee, a scenario that critics denounced as “silly and specious”—until a week later, when the Abu Ghraib abuses were exposed. According to Fontana, Strip Search was inspired by a direct reading of the Patriot Act in early 2002. As the creator of Oz and Homicide: Life on the Street, he knew the rules of interrogation, and he could see that they had moved the line. He was deeply troubled when the real-life abuses came forward. “You know what? I wish I had made it all up. I wish I had made it up in my twisted imagination, and that the world hadn’t caught up with me.”

New York metro.com Link to full article

24 January 05

WB Net enrolls in hour drama from Fontana

The WB Network has added Emmy winner Tom Fontana to the roster of A-list producers set to deliver pilots to the network this development season.

Hollywood Reporter Jan. 10, 2005 Link to full article

Mystery Writers of America Votes Honors to Tom Fontana, David Chase.

 Mystery Writers of America has conferred Special Edgar Awards on Tom Fontana and David Chase for their groundbreaking work in television crime shows.

… Fontana is known for his deft handling of gritty subject matter and intimate look at the various participants in the criminal justice system: the investigators, the prisoners, and most recently, the jurors.

Mystery Writers of America Link to press release

Award from the Caucus for Television Producers Writers and Directors

Tom Fontana will receive a lifetime achievement award from the Caucus for Television Producers, Writers and Directors at the organizations annual gala on January 13th in Beverly Hills. Fontana will be honored for his Emmy-winning work on TV as well as his theatre output.

Variety, Wed., Nov.24, 2004 Link to full article

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